Biboran wrote:Looks cool! But maybe do an inperial dragon on basically neutral object is not the best idea?

Thanks!

My thought about this was that "where else than Cyrodiil would this weapon have been made?". If you look at the design, it's not very Norse, so it's probably not made in Skyrim. There's also already a Nordic Claymore afaik. It does not look elvish either. What's left? Imperial Dragon it is. Do give me a better idea if you can come up with it.

AnyOldName3 wrote:if that's Blender, are you using Cycles or the internal renderer? I could maybe take a gander at your material setup if you think it's being weird.

I'm using the internal renderer. I was just being lazy, the only tutorials I found on how to add specular maps was via Cycles, and I didn't want to start over again. Stupid material crap. Maybe tomorrow.

The internal renderer by default assigns things a white lambertian diffuse shader, and a white specular shader that's labelled Cook-Torrance, but actually isn't. (In fact, all the specular shaders in the internal renderer are misnamed, mostly because at one point in Blender's development, people liked hardcoding ones and zeroes in shaders until they reduced down to a simpler shader that would run faster, but which already had a different name.) When you add a texture, it automatically associates it with the diffuse colour (and weirdly this is under the texture tab, even though it's a property of a material). If you go to the texture tab with an object selected, you can add a second texture (or pick an existing one from the drop down) and then scroll until you see a load of tickboxes saying what it should influence. Turning on specular intensity and/or colour will make it use it as a specular map.

Ok, so when I started working on this, I wanted to have the vanilla mesh in the scene when I modeled so that I could use it to see that I got the right proportions and so on. I used NifSkope to export the vanilla mesh to .obj format so that I could open it in Blender 2.71.

Thanks to DestinedToDie since he helped me get this model exported to .nif format, even though he had to go to hell and back to get it done.

AnyOldName3 wrote:The internal renderer by default assigns things a white lambertian diffuse shader, and a white specular shader that's labelled Cook-Torrance, but actually isn't. (In fact, all the specular shaders in the internal renderer are misnamed, mostly because at one point in Blender's development, people liked hardcoding ones and zeroes in shaders until they reduced down to a simpler shader that would run faster, but which already had a different name.) When you add a texture, it automatically associates it with the diffuse colour (and weirdly this is under the texture tab, even though it's a property of a material). If you go to the texture tab with an object selected, you can add a second texture (or pick an existing one from the drop down) and then scroll until you see a load of tickboxes saying what it should influence. Turning on specular intensity and/or colour will make it use it as a specular map.

I don't know what was more freaky though, that sword itself or the fact that Fargoth, while I was looking at the sword wondering how the hell this happened, still were like "GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS".

lysol wrote:My thought about this was that "where else than Cyrodiil would this weapon have been made?". If you look at the design, it's not very Norse, so it's probably not made in Skyrim. There's also already a Nordic Claymore afaik. It does not look elvish either. What's left? Imperial Dragon it is. Do give me a better idea if you can come up with it.

I has no better idea sorry Mybe Old Ebonheart symbol? http://i1273.photobucket.com/albums/y41 ... g~original
I only know that dragon often means that this is Imperial Legion symbol, like now in Project Cyrodiil they want do some version of Imperial armour without dragon to show that this is cyrodic, but not legion

Anyway, here's the latest progress. I'm not really happy with the gold color yet. The problem with gold is that its color is so dependent on the reflected color, and it shold reflect A LOT. These specular maps does not reflect that much. Well, it does reflect light, yes, but only direct light. I wish we had PBR already, it would make this much easier.

Oh, this is pretty good! You do realize that I already made a new model for the steel claymore and all other steel weapons some time ago? Just saying, because it could possibly have saved you some work...
I have been planning to make new textures for them, too, but there has not been much progress, sadly. Looks like you are going to beat me to it. Oh, well. I had actually started working on the claymore (very early test), but never finished it...

Anyway, the more, the better. Especially if it looks as good as what you did there.

But I came to post here for a different reason. When I just was playing around with normal maps in OpenMW myself, I noticed that sometimes the same normal map would appear inverted or mirrored on different meshes. I quickly realized that this happens if the uv map is mirrored (for example the top part of meshes/x/ex_hlaalu_canal_02.nif with the Tx_hlaalu_wall2_02 texture). This causes normal maps to react to light in the "wrong direction", but only along one axis, so it's not like a bump is suddenly a dent, and vice versa, but it just looks off.
This seems to be a general problem with normal maps, and I don't know if there is a universal solution to it. Of course, I realize that in many cases this would barely be noticeable (and from the Skyrim modding community I know that a large portion of players don't have the slightest clue how normal maps work and would never notice an error like this). Still, Morrowind's meshes were not made with normal maps in mind, and the uv maps on many meshes are a mess, anyway, so maybe this should be kept in mind for future normal map mods for OpenMW.In my opinion, even with just diffuse textures in high resolution the flaws in the meshes get more apparent, and normal maps on everything will probably further add to the problem.